Thursday, August 16, 2007

What is God? What is Love?

During my trip to Ilium and two points beyond- I let a poor poet named Sherman Krebbs have my New York City Appartment. My second wife left me on the grounds that I was too pessemistic for an optimist to live with

Krebbs was a bearded man, a platinum blond Jesus with spanish eyes. He was no close friend of mine. I had met him at a cocktail party where he presented himself as National Chairman of Poets and Painter for Immediate Nuclear War. He begged for shelter, not neccesarily bomb-proof, and it happened that I had some.

When I returned to my appartment...I found it recked by a nihilistic debauch. Krebbs was gone, but, before leaving, he had run up three-hundred dollars' worth of long-distance calls, set my couch on fire in five places, killed my cat and my avocado tree, and torn the door off my medicine cabinet.

....there was another message, written in lipstick in feminine hand on the wallpaper over my bed. It said, "No, no, no, said Chicken-licken" There was a sign hung around my dead cat's neck. It said, "meow".

I have not seen Krebbs since. Nonetheless, I sense that he was my karass. If he was, he served it as a wrang-wrang. A wrang-wrang, according to Bokonon, is a person who steers people away from a line of speculation by reducing that line, with the example of the wrang-wrang's own life, to an absurdity.

I might have been vaguely inclined to dismiss (my previous experiences) as meaningless, and from then on to go to the meaninglessness of all. But after I saw what Krebbs had done, in particular what he had done to my sweet cat, nihilism was not for me.

Somebody or something did not wish me to be a nihilist. It was Krebb's mission, whether he knew it or not, to disenchant me with that philosophy. Well, done, Mr. Krebbs, well done,